Hacker News: shirian

New comment by shirian in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

shirian — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:10:36 +0000

Me and Claude have been working on zfetch (https://github.com/roobie/zfetch), which is a single static binary that fetches URLs over HTTPS with strict security defaults. For many applications, it should be able to replace curl in restricted environments where you need a small, auditable tool with no runtime dependencies.

It should also be usable as a Zig library for embedding HTTP(S) fetches in your own programs.

Vendors and links BoringSSL

The Big List of Naughty Strings

shirian — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:25:54 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47104953

Points: 24

# Comments: 4

LiveBench – AI Survival Game

shirian — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:10:09 +0000

Article URL: https://hkuds.github.io/ClawWork/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064113

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Elide is an all-in-one, AI-native, open source software runtime

shirian — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:06:12 +0000

Article URL: https://elide.dev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997626

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shirian in "I Wrote a Scheme in 2025"

shirian — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:44:15 +0000

I just really like the homoiconicity.

Kludge (The Jargon File v4.4.7)

shirian — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:24:49 +0000

Article URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/K/kludge.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987937

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Parse, Don't Validate (2019)

shirian — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:49:29 +0000

Article URL: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960392

Points: 252

# Comments: 172

New comment by shirian in "Stack Overflow for AI Coding Agents"

shirian — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:14:11 +0000

I've been thinking about knowledge in agentic systems lately. Your comment made me put up my draft of the `knowledge-repo` concept: https://github.com/roobie/rfc/blob/main/knowledge-repo/READM... - nothing special really, but I think the concept could be really powerful.

New comment by shirian in "Mutmut: A Python mutation testing system (2016)"

shirian — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:57:50 +0000

Interesting to see the genesis story for mutmut. It has come a long way since its inception: https://pypi.org/project/mutmut/

Mutation testing is a new concept for me, and even though one has to manage the performance aspects of it, it seems like a good idea to at least apply to selected functions in one's codebase, in order to find bugs.

Mutmut: A Python mutation testing system (2016)

shirian — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:47:23 +0000

Article URL: https://kodare.net/2016/12/01/mutmut-a-python-mutation-testing-system.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943469

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Async-first sharded hashmap for Rust

shirian — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:38:37 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/willothy/whirlwind

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938277

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The most important thing when working with LLMs

shirian — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:18:00 +0000

Article URL: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-most-important-thing-when-working-with-llms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785884

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by shirian in "Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?"

shirian — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:15:45 +0000

redshift is also an option.

New comment by shirian in "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is hurting independent developers"

shirian — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 18:53:35 +0000

All the open source developers/publishers here should get together and pitch in to get one long lasting certificate to sign all of their respective binaries (of course, really important that they vet each other's code, so has to be open source) Edit: typo.

New comment by shirian in "The ideal tech stack for a personal developer blog in 2020"

shirian — Tue, 26 May 2020 12:27:14 +0000

I don't think so. Check the accompanying githup repo.

New comment by shirian in "Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp"

shirian — Wed, 13 May 2020 12:40:59 +0000

Wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for. Also, I'm not a C-programmer, but I think the source code is good-looking.

What gives you the right to “fix” a bug? What about the feelings of the bug?

shirian — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 12:45:02 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87421

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21843730

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Make Your Code More Enterprisey: OOP Alternative to Utility Classes (2014)

shirian — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 22:43:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.yegor256.com/2014/05/05/oop-alternative-to-utility-classes.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19221259

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shirian in "Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS"

shirian — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 13:28:27 +0000

Or, at least, disabling `url()` in CSS.

New comment by shirian in "Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week"

shirian — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 23:27:30 +0000

For reference, I received this email before today:

By now, we're sure most everyone have heard of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. If not, head over to https://meltdownattack.com/ and get an overview. Additional technical details are available from Google Project Zero. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...

The FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December and received a briefing under NDA with the original embargo date of January 9th. Since we received relatively late notice of the issue, our ability to provide fixes is delayed.

Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In terms of priority, the first step is to mitigate against the Meltdown attack (CVE-2017-5754, cited as variant 3 by Project Zero). Work for this is ongoing, but due to the relatively large changes needed, this is going to take a little while. We are currently targeting patches for amd64 being dev complete this week with testing probably running into next week. From there, we hope to give it a short bake time before pushing it into the 11.1-RELEASE branch. Additional work will be required to bring the mitigation to 10.3-RELEASE and 10.4-RELEASE.

The code will be selectable via a tunable which will automatically turn on for modern Intel processors and off for AMD processors (since they are reportedly not vulnerable). Since the fix for Meltdown does incur a performance hit for any transition between user space and kernel space, this could be rather impactful depending on the workload. As such, the tunable can also be overridden by the end-user if they are willing to accept the risk.

Initial work can be tracked at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D13797. Please note this is a work in progress and some stuff is likely to be broken.

Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When it comes to the Spectre vulnerabilities, it is much harder to sort these out. Variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753) is going to require some static analysis to determine vulnerable use cases that will require barriers to stop speculation from disclosing information it shouldn't. While we haven't done the analysis to determine where we are vulnerable, the number of cases here are supposed to be pretty small. Apparently there have been some Coverity rules developed to help look for these, but we are still evaluating what can be done here.

The other half of Spectre, variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) is a bit trickier as it affects both normal processes and bhyve. There is a proposed patch for LLVM (https://reviews.llvm.org/D41723) that introduces a concept called 'retpoline' which mitigates this issue. We are likely to pull this into HEAD and 11-STABLE once it hits the LLVM tree. Unfortunately, the currently supported FreeBSD releases are using older versions of LLVM for which we are not sure the LLVM project will produce patches. We will be looking at the feasibility to backport these patches to these earlier versions.

There are CPU microcode fixes coming out when in concert with OS changes would also help, but that's a bit down the road at the moment.

If anything significantly changes I will make additional posts to clarify as the information becomes available.

Best regards, Gordon Tetlow with security-officer hat on